Your Digital Strategy Shouldn’t Be About Attention

Are they talking about your brand? Around the clock? From Facefriend to Tweeter to Instapal?

Pssst.

That’s probably not the right question.

Today, too many strategists believe that a clever plan to win the internet’s attention is a good digital strategy.

It’s not. Why? The painful truth is: attention itself isn’t worth as much as today’s marketers, boardrooms, and beancounters think. It’s not just that there’s good and bad attention — awe versus scorn, for example. Attention is a fickle, fleeting thing on which to build a business model, let alone a business, let alone an institution. Hence, attention without relation is like revenue without profit: malinvestment.

Institutions and leaders, obedient students of modern marketing, obsessively ask, “How do we get people to be loyal to us?” Meanwhile, they’re often (let’s be honest with each other for a painful moment) busy gleefully plotting to betray them at every turn. Hide the fees! Shrink the fine print! Why give customers cheese when you can sell them “cheese-like product”? Most “digital business models” are similarly sneaky — track their data! Make the terms and conditions impossible to understand! Why take the time to get to know your customers … as long as you can get them to use the corporate hashtag.

The real question — the one that counts for leaders and institutions today — isn’t “How loyal can we compel, seduce, or trick our customers into being?” It’s: “How loyal are we to our customers? Do we truly care about them?” Not just as targets consumers, or fans. But as people. Human beings. What every institution needs — and what every leader needs to develop — before a “digital strategy” is a human strategy. If you want to matter to people, you must do more than merely win their fickle, fleeting, frenzied attention. You must help them develop into the people they were meant to be. When you do, maybe, just maybe, they’ll reward you. With something greater than their grudging, wearied attention. Their lasting respect, enduring trust, and undying gratitude.

So here are my top four mistakes of digital strategy — and how not to make them.

Insight Center

Titillating, not educating. It’s easy to win “clicks” by titillating people with Kim Kardashian’s naked behind or a list of the world’s cutest human-cat baby unicorn fairies. And it might lend a dreary day a moment of relieved escapism. But it won’t help anyone. To do that, you must educate. Not in the awful, misused corporate sense of the term: dully lecturing them about “product benefits.” But helping them develop the capabilities and skills they’re going to need to live better lives. What will your “digital strategy” help them become better at? Does it have a point? Skiing, dating, cooking, coding, creating, building? If the answer is no, you don’t have a strategy. You have a vaudeville show.

Making zombies, not superheroes. Too much of digital strategy is simply turned over to the marketing department. And modern marketing makes zombies. Most of the time, let’s face it: marketing is a tedious exercise in brainwashing. Or at least a poor attempt at it. See this toothpaste? If you use it, supermodels will fall at your feet! Or … maybe your life will still be a bleakness punctuated by short moments of internet humor. Here’s the problem with creating marketing zombies. Sure, they might raid your malls. But once they’re done, they’ll probably try to eat your head. By that I mean that when all you do is earn people’s attention, without trying to earn their respect or trust, they can turn on you on a dime. Today’s viral hit is tomorrow’s laughingstock. Sorry, I mean the next nanosecond’s. That’s why making people zombies is a bad idea not just for the zombies … but for the mad scientists. Unless you happen to want to spend the rest of your life at war with the people formerly known as your customers. Creating an army of zombie customers is a terrible way to build a great brand.

Infecting, not connecting. The holy grail of the digital marketing strategy is “virality.” But the goal of a digital business strategy is connection. One is shallow and fleeting; the other is deep and enduring. Connection means more than just gawping at your “content” when it’s trending. Connection means going beyond the strictures of marketing, and literally forging living, breathing relationships. It requires that you actually empower people to act as advisers, counselors, mentors to your customers … not just plastering your logo on digital billboards, or winning two more Facestagram hearts.

Consider Mr Porter, the man-cousin of Net-a-Porter. There, a fashion-challenged dork (a.k.a. yours truly) can ask experts for fashion advice, anytime, via internet chat. Or just learn how to make a great cup of coffee, if I’m not in the mood to buy anything. Reviewers have gushed over its ridiculously accurate sizing measurements and other little-luxury touches like a personalized label inside the shipping box and same-day delivery (in some cities). These may not sound like much … but they’re a tiny revelation when your world expands suddenly. Its rivals try to infect the entire internet with glamorous photoshoots studded with celebrities — something Mr Porter eschews completely. But those competitors are playing a losing game: trying harder and harder to win more and more uncertain gains in attention that last shorter and shorter. But what they won’t win is stable, less and less risky, long-run gains in trust, which endure and grow. Those must be earned; one connection at a time.

Communicating, not elevating. Digital tools have given companies the ability to communicate incredibly quickly with a ridiculously large number of people at low cost. But just communicating isn’t good enough anymore. The internet is full of sound and fury … signifying nothing. It’s full of trolls, haters, and loons, but they’re all communicating, aren’t they? The challenge isn’t merely communicating anymore. It’s elevating. Let me put it this way. You can use the latest, greatest social network as a tool to broadcast your crappy promise that no one really cares about. Or you can use it to build a book club, or a running group, a support group, a counseling center, a peer-funded scholarship. See the difference? One is about volume. The other about values. And creating value.

How do you build a digital strategy that rockets past loyalty through the horizon of marketing as we know it and into the wild blue yonder of trust, respect, and maybe even love? Simple. Forget about “building the brand.” Ignore the rules of communication. They were built to sell miraculously mass-made “product” to a stable, secure, sedated middle class forever ascending upwards into the plastic cornucopia of perfect prosperity.

Instead, focus on giving people what matters most to them — but what they feel cheated of, stymied from, and suffocated by at every turn. Improve their lives. Deliver lasting gains in their quality of life. Don’t just carrot-and-stick them into “loyalty.” Be loyal to them. Don’t win their attention — give them your attention. And one tiny interaction at a time, help them live lives richer with meaning, happiness, and purpose. After all, they’re the only people that can help you find something greater, truer, and better than a strategy. A point.